Authors:Hassan JalaliPages: 30 - 39Abstract: Publication date: 2017 Source:Ampersand, Volume 4 Author(s): Hassan Jalali The study of linguistic devices serving as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer, the reader and the propositional meaning could be examined. This paper looks at a particular structural group of lexical bundles encoding stance expressions. These are clausal bundles starting with an anticipatory it in which subject comes at the end of the clause (e.g. it is important to, it should be noted that). The use of these bundles is compared in three corpora of research articles, doctoral dissertations and master theses, all in the discipline of applied linguistics, to explore the possible generic variations and address the potential differences between published and students writing too. Drawing on Hewings and Hewings' [23] functional typology of interpersonal roles of it clauses, the study shows that the use of this structural group of bundles in research articles was significantly more than that of the two groups of postgraduate writing. However, there were some it bundles used more heavily by one or both groups of postgraduate students. Functional analysis also revealed that these bundles encoded stance expressions of hedging, attitude marking, emphasis, attribution and epistemic meanings. The differences are explained by referring to generic expectations and students' growing disciplinary identity. There are also some implications for the academic writing.

Authors:Koji TannoPages: 58 - 72Abstract: Publication date: 2017 Source:Ampersand, Volume 4 Author(s): Koji Tanno Many languages have common or stock phrases that are used when the speaker is unsure about how to say a certain thing, as with such English expressions as how should I put it' and something like X. In conversation, one strategy to avoid turning into a silence is to give a tentative choice with the hope that the addressee will understand the speaker's meaning. The Japanese discourse marker toiuka started as such a parenthetical expression that appears in mid-sentence and indicates the speaker's difficulty in lexical choice. It subsequently shifted to the utterance-initial and -final positions and gained new uses. The present article examines the diachronic development of this expression, using data from the National Diet Minutes Corpus [1], the Ninjobon ‘Love Story Books’ Corpus [2], and the Taiyo ‘Sun Magazine’ Corpus [3]. We keep track of the pragmatic-semantic and syntactic patterns over time quantitatively and show from a usage-based approach how this gradual process occurred.

Authors:Jun ZhaoAbstract: Publication date: Available online 15 July 2017 Source:Ampersand Author(s): Jun Zhao This paper joins the Native vs. Non-native writer dichotomy discussion of whether native speakers of English enjoy advantage in the academic writing context from the linguistic perspective by analyzing conjunctive realizations of four groups of writers: English L1 and L2 graduate students; English L1 and L2 scholars in applied linguistics. Fifteen essays from each group are compared on their explicit conjunctions and Logical Grammatical Metaphors (LGMs). Both graduate student groups employ explicit conjunctions more than the two scholar groups. For LGMs, not only do both graduate student groups differ from the two scholar groups, they also differ significantly from each other. In contrast, the two scholar groups show similar usage in explicit conjunctions and LGMs. Qualitative differences of conjunctive usage and lexical varieties are also found among the four groups. The study points out that writer experience overweighs their native-speaker status in academic writing. The findings question the native-speaker linguistic advantage to a certain extent and indicate complexity of this issue. As language for academic purposes is strikingly different from spoken language and cognitively more demanding, academic language needs to be learned and developed out of disciplinary studies with targeted instruction for all novice writers, regardless of their native or non-native speaker status.

Authors:Kaori FuruyaAbstract: Publication date: Available online 24 June 2017 Source:Ampersand Author(s): Kaori Furuya This paper aims to investigate the morphosyntactic properties of the person feature in the English imposter construction studied by Collins & Postal. In this construction, the same definite DP can select a 1st person reflexive or a 3rd person reflexive. Moreover, despite of the distinct person feature value, a 3rd person (non-reflexive) pronoun can have the reference to a speaker in the given contexts like a 1st person pronoun. This use of a 3rd person argument differs from that of a 3rd person argument that refers to the 3rd party. The present paper analyzes the mechanism of the person feature and its morphological realization (particularly 3rd person) in English, and proposes the dissociation of notional person (the semantics of the person feature) and grammatical person morphological realization). Both notional and grammatical person are not always uniquely associated with each other nor always equally encoded into a definite DP as well as a pronominal DP. The paper also argues that 3rd person is always a neutral/invariable form in English. Despite of it, a 3rd person argument is shown to have a feature specification. This paper demonstrates that the morphosyntactic variation associated with 3rd person agreement in English pronoun-antecedent relations is attributed to the lack of the uniform relation between the semantics of the person feature and its morphology, not to the syntactic operations.

Authors:Rafe S. Zaabalawi; Anthony M. GouldAbstract: Publication date: Available online 10 March 2017 Source:Ampersand Author(s): Rafe S. Zaabalawi, Anthony M. Gould Collocations are a class of idiomatic expressions comprised of a sequence of words which, for mostly arbitrary reasons, occur together in a prescribed order. Collocations are not necessarily grammatical and/or cannot be generated through knowledge of rules or formulae. Therefore, they are often not easily mastered by EFL learners and typically only dealt with during the latter phase of second language apprenticeship. Literature has mostly examined the phenomenon of collocations from one of two perspectives. First, there are studies focusing on error analysis and contingent pedagogical advice. Second, there is research concerned with theory development; a genre associated with a specific methodological limitations. This study reports on data pertaining to a novel approach to learning collocations; one based on a learner's incidental discovery of such structures in written texts. Our research question is: will students who have been introduced to and practiced specific collocations in reading texts be inclined to naturally use such exemplars appropriately in novel/unfamiliar subsequent contexts? Findings have implications for EFL teachers and those concerned with curriculum development.

Authors:Gyu-Ho ShinAbstract: Publication date: Available online 16 February 2017 Source:Ampersand Author(s): Gyu-Ho Shin This study investigates developmental aspects of English Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs) for Korean-speaking second language (L2) learners, providing evidence of how they manifest human domain-general cognitive systems during language acquisition via usage-based constructional approaches to language development. Participants were instructed on six English ASC types with their representative verbs for three months. The data from grammaticality preference tasks, writing tests, and free-writing tasks were analysed. Comprehension data from the grammaticality preference tasks showed significant improvement in understanding ASCs after instruction, supporting sentence-level generalisations for language comprehension independent of individual verbs. The production data from the writing tests demonstrated more frequent use of two-argument constructions than three-argument ones, which indicates the internal complexity between ASC types. The results of the writing tests also displayed skewed exploitation of verbs representative of the target ASCs, implying a frequency-sensitive nature of language acquisition. All production data further revealed active use of prefabricated chunks and incorporation of new and old language items. Taken all together, these observations suggest language learners’ merging narrowly stabilised L2 routines with other (non-)linguistic resources as necessary, sustaining efficiency in a sentence-building process, under the superintendence of cognitive factors when satisfying communicative intents.

Authors:Tatiana Rasskazova; Maria Guzikova; Anthony GreenAbstract: Publication date: Available online 2 February 2017 Source:Ampersand Author(s): Tatiana Rasskazova, Maria Guzikova, Anthony Green The evaluation of teacher professional development efficiency has always been an issue that has attracted attention of professionals in education. This paper reports on the results of a two-year English language teacher professional development programme following a Needs Analysis study conducted by Cambridge ESOL in 2012. Longitudinal research shows that in Russia English language teaching has several problems which exist throughout decades. This article focuses on some of them: class interaction mode; the use of native (Russian) language in class; error correction strategies employed by teachers. A new approach to evaluation was employed by asking students and teachers the same questions from different perspectives on areas identified during the needs analysis study. The results varied in significance, though some positive changes have been noticed in class interaction mode, little has changed in the error correction strategies, the use of Russian in the classroom seems to be quite reasonable and does not interfere with learning. Overall, the study may be useful for general audience, especially for the post-Soviet countries as it provides evidence of change management and their impact on ELT. The findings presented in this paper seek to contribute to the formulation or adjustment of policies related to educational reforms, such as curriculum reform and teacher professional development in non-English-speaking countries.